An online poem by Jessy Randall has an unusual presenter: a little kid with a British accent and enough stage presence to assure a successful theater career (even when she flubs her lines).<\/p>\n
Randall\u2019s poem, titled \u201cMy Friends,\u201d is featured this month on the website Smories, which shows videos of children reading poems and very short stories written for kids.<\/p>\n
Randall, the archivist and curator of special sections at Tutt Library, says she doesn\u2019t usually write rhyming poems, but this one is an exception.<\/p>\n
\u201cI loved Cricket<\/em> magazine when I was a kid, and my mom subscribed my daughter to Cricket\u2019s little-sibling magazine, Ladybug<\/em>, which has poems in it,\u201d Randall says. She thought it would be fun to have a poem in Ladybug<\/em>, and noticed they seemed to run short rhyming things.<\/p>\n \u201cSo I wrote a set of rhyming couplets that I thought Ladybug<\/em> would eat up. Well, Ladybug<\/em> didn\u2019t care for them. They sat in my files for a long time.\u201d Eventually, a friend sent Randall a link to Smories and she submitted her poem.<\/p>\n Randall, the author of several books of poetry, says \u201cThe key to the humor in the poem, for me, is making the rhyme be a little unexpected. So, if I were doing one for \u201cJane\u201d I couldn\u2019t rhyme it with \u201cplain\u201d \u2013 I\u2019d have to think of something weirder, like maybe \u201cdrain.\u201d<\/p>\n